10 iOS Games for Improving Your Touch Screen Typing

It's not easy to adjust to typing on the iPhone or iPad virtual keyboard -- it's small, cramped, and lacks tactile feedback. If you're eager to master the art of touch screen typing, though, you can rest assured that there's an app for that. We've found 10 awesome iOS games that'll provide the perfect guilt-free play experience, letting you improve your typing skills and have fun at the same time. With help from these iOS typing games, you'll be touch screen typing like a pro in no time.

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iOS Typing Games

Color-coded words fall from the top of the screen to form a haphazard tower in the physics-based Typeaholic ($0.99, iPhone). You get extra points for typing consecutive words of the same color, but you'll need to take note of the height of your word tower -- if it goes off the screen, you lose. There's local and online multiplayer, as well as a single-player mode.

A quirky homage to cult-classic Typing of the Dead, Texting of the Bread ($0.99, iPhone or iPad) pits you against hordes of gingerbread zombies. With a cow strapped to your back, you need to shoot the zombies by typing the letters or words above their heads. It's packed with multiple game modes and great pop-culture-laden humor, but unfortunately freezes on an iPhone 4S.

Fast Typer 2 (Free, Universal) is simple, hectic fun. In an arcade-style battle of attrition, you type words of increasing length against the clock. Get five words in a row without error to buy more time. If you run out of time, it's game over. The sense of speed and urgency makes this one hard to put down, and it'll challenge players of all skill levels.

Think you can touch type on an iOS keyboard? Well, see how you go on Typing Hell (Free, iPhone), which removes the letters from the keys to leave you with a faceless QWERTY keyboard. The goal is simple: type as much of the upward-scrolling text document as possible before it reaches the top of the screen, striking letters from the page and earning points as you go.

There are loads of space shooters on iOS, but few share ControlShift's (Free, iPhone) typing controls. Type the words trailing each enemy spaceship to destroy it. Rockets generally approach with a single-digit number, and you also have two nukes that will wipe out the screen. Like many of the games listed here, it's orientation-locked -- this time in landscape.

If you want to get a bit more serious, TapTyping ($3.99, Universal) offers an educational bent on the typing game. Reminiscent of Mavis Beacon games of old, it has lessons, speed tests, statistics, and global leaderboards. You can potentially save money by getting the free version and picking-and-choosing in-app purchases; the paid version provides all content up-front.

Based on a Facebook game of the same name, Typing Maniac ($0.99, iPhone) challenges players to type falling words before they reach the bottom of the screen. Words fall faster when you make an error, and there are four special moves to help ease the pressure. The nervous protagonist's expression gives great visual cues as to how you're progressing.

Aliens have sent monsters made of text to attack us, and you must fire special bullets of matching letters and symbols in order to destroy them and save the Earth. That's the premise of Font Monsters ($1.99, Universal), a game that tests your analytical skills as much as your ability to quickly find characters on the keyboard.

Burning Fingers (Free, iPhone) is great for the competitive typist. The four-player online mode challenges you to out-type opponents in copying the sentence in the middle of the screen. An old-school 2D car race ensues above, with each car representative of its player's position in the sentence. There's also an offline training mode for single player.

Epic Typing Challenge (Free, iPhone) may not live up to its name, but it's still a pretty decent take on the standard "type the word on-screen before time runs out" approach. Your allotment of time varies for each word, and depends on its length. You can choose any combination of the 17 word collections provided, playing either in 10-word bursts or until you fail.